By Andrew Reeves
AMF Bowling Pinbusters! is an attempt to introduce a little more flavor into
the bowling genre on the iPhone platform. Sure, great looking games with useful
and intuitive controls have been done already, but screw those guys. Pinbusters!
seems to follow the train of thought that you haven't played a real bowling game
until you've been immersed into a global competition of poorly scripted
characters and controls that make me wish accelerometers were never invented.
Before going any further I'd like to say that, having spent a few years around a
bowling alley when I was growing up, I have a certain amount of respect for the
sport and usually look forward to a clever simulation. Unfortunately, Pinbusters!
falls short of this after you hit the menu system and never really recovers.
There is no way to select the level of difficulty as you hobble through the
menu system that was clearly not designed for the iPhone interface, so I can't
really cover that, but I can say that the option would probably be pointless as
the physics appear to be broken and it doesn't matter how well you bowl, there
will always be some sort of luck required to knock all ten pins down. One thing
Pinbusters! does have is a few different modes, including a 'quick play' and
'practice' mode so you can try to get a handle on how the different phases of
each shot happen. I recommend these because there's no tutorial, and the
scrolling text hidden away in the options menu that describes how to swing the
ball leaves out details like where on the screen you can tap to advance to the
next part of your shot. You'll need this information to keep yourself from
throwing your phone out the window in frustration over why some parts of the
screen appear to respond, while the others drop your taps into a void of
despair. Once you get the hang of trying to balance your phone perfectly
upright, or have given up and laid it down on the table to prevent it from
steering your player (or ball) during either phase of the shot, because both
touch and accelerometer controls are enabled by default and both stay on no
matter what you do, you can fire up the 'world cup' mode to vie for the world's
most coveted soccer award.. no wait, that's not right.. moving on.
Along your travels, you will roll your ball down the gutter of 12
eccentrically designed lanes each with their own character counterpart that will
deliver some of the cheesiest one-liners I've ever had the privilege to groan
about. I get the feeling that underneath the light and flaky layer of
disappointment Pinbusters! serves up in the fun department, there was actually a
decent idea to try and make bowling exciting. Which is really too bad, because I
think with a little more work they could have cleaned things up a bit and
presented it in a much friendlier light than it shines now.
I've touched on the issues with controls and menus, but some of the other
problems I had with the game were far more basic, and in turn that much more
difficult to understand why they weren't thought of during the development
process. My primary example of this is the lack of ability to save your progress
as you play through the 'world cup' mode. The game definitely keeps track of
which characters you've defeated, allows you to play as them, and bowl on their
lanes in other modes, but any interruption, either from a phone call or other
need to exit the application, will land you a one way trip back to the starting
point. Maybe this is how the game attempts to extend its replayability, but
saving the current user state is a feature that nearly 90% of every other game
in the app store possesses, and the ones that don't typically find themselves
thrown to the bottom of the app barrel by discontent gamers. Another mode I was
happy to see, but left me wanting more was multiplayer. The pass-and-play only
functionality is nice, but with so many games utilizing the iPhone OS 3.x API's
to allow for battles over WiFi and Bluetooth connections it doesn't move the
Pinbusters! score ahead, and I'm guessing it also isn't helping to sell any
extra copies.
The last game play feature I'll tackle before moving on is physics. I've
watched more bowling than I care to admit, and I can almost positively say that
there is something not quite right with the Pinbusters! physics engine. The game
doesn't deliver any camera angles to help prove that pin action is weird, but
it's almost as if the ball has the ability to blow directly through a subset of
pins while not knocking over any neighboring targets that clearly should be
taken out based on the speed and angle of attack. The best description I can
offer towards this is that the pins appear to be heavily weighted and at times,
strangely anchored to their spots. Even stranger, I witnessed what I like to
call the vacuum shot on multiple occasions where the sheer velocity of a ball
passing by a pin seemed to cause the top of it to be sucked in and fall towards
the near miss path. I also attempted to get some consistency out of the physics
engine by bowling directly down the middle of the lane at different power
levels. Highest power returned the same 4, 6, 7, 10 split every time, but the
lowest shot power returned all sorts of interesting and random results including
a number of strikes.
I had a hard time deciding how to grade the graphics of Pinbusters!. I have
to give credit to any developer willing to take a shot at 3D graphics on the
iPhone. As with any mobile platform, developers face a restrictive set of system
resources to pull from and the need to plan out how you're going to use those
resources over the course of your application becomes incredibly vital. I was
about to give Pinbusters! a pass on the category until I remembered that I'm
looking at a port of an already released N-Gage title and that this game had an
even more limited set of resources before it found a new home on the iPhone.
Everything from texture quality, to the 2D-looking ball you roll down the 3D
lane, to the suffering frame rate, left me struggling with a new found sense of
abandonment.
Focusing my thoughts elsewhere and repressing the worrying graphics
realization I had just come to, I turned to audio in the hopes that Pinbusters!
might offer a soft melody or two to calm my nerves or maybe a guitar riff that
would attempt to melt my face as I haphazardly downed my opponents in a quest
for world domination. Alas, there was none of that to be had, and the
mid-quality audio which sounds to have made its way over with the rest of its
brethren from the previous platform, left me yearning for the ability to be able
to select music from my own iPod collection. I would have even settled for the
audio to simply understand that I had flipped the mute switch, but it's better
this way as I probably would have been far more frightened to see something
working at this point.
Final Rating: 28%
